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L.A.D.D.I.E.
'''L.A.D.D.I.E. '''is the advanced automated economic advisor of Swallow Hills, an occupation held both prior to and after the Great War. Originally built and designed by a collection of prominent scientists of California to monitor the lavish town's heavily burdened economy. Although barely online for four years before the Great War, his post-war economic projections proved his reliability, though only to L.A.D.D.I.E. himself, due to the fact he was buried in the Commercial district. Nevertheless, the neurotic supercomputer found himself easily satisfied by both his needless work and his rather dull entertainment; a repetitive and constantly looping game of Pong. To anyone who stumbles across this light-hearted, albeit insane, supercomputer, L.A.D.D.I.E. is very keen to inform them of his current Pong score; and of the potential rewards they could reap from his valuable information about economic projections. Biography In 2057, the town of Swallow Hills was suffering an inevitable decline economically from years of debt accrued in the race for technological marvels. The town faced a crisis of terrible proportions, but, for fear of driving away potential investors and citizens, worsening the economic problem, did not admit fully the scale of the problem. Tax rises and corruption were an inevitable effect of these problems, with a desperate local government seeking help wherever it could find it. Ewan Donoughmore, a Scottish inventor whom had recently been laid off from his occupation at RobCo Industries over ethical concerns, was keen to make a fresh start in the town and thus offered his services and ideas to heal the town's economy. With other fellow scientists also on board, working for modest fees to find a solution to the monetary woes, an idea was eventually reached; a ZAX supercomputer, akin to those currently in use in the New York stock exchange and Vault-Tec Corporation, seemed both a futuristic and effective manner of anticipating problems and solving them, allowing for the current economic woes of the town to be fixed. The local governance, at this point desperate and all-but won over by the idea of being the first town to have it's own supercomputer agreed unanimously, much to Donoughmore's delight. Funds were immediately allocated, workers hired and construction started in late 2057. Within two years, the project had already gone through it's ups and downs; first came the allocation of perfectly suited vacant land to digging, then came arguments over funding and missing workers, not to mention legal issues with the use of the ZAX name in the supercomputer brought up by Vault-Tec's legal team. The turbulent political atmosphere of the time, especially with fuel rationing on the horizon, made the project a slow and tedious one. Bitter scientists, after two years of relatively fruitless outcome, gave up and moved on to more prosperous grounds. Donoughmore, however, simply refused to give up, insisting that the project would succeed. Throughout the late and 2050s and early 2060s, Donoughmore personally oversaw the digging and design of the supercomputer, single-handedly designing the supercomputer's chassis and main computational systems. Impressed with his work, the Swallow Hills local government finally allocated extra resources and employed fellow advisors to aid Donoughmore in his work in 2065. However, the strain the past few years had wrought on Donoughmore seemed to have culminated in a high blood pressure, resulting in a fatal heart attack not one year later in 2066. With the work on the main underground housing, built in the style of some of the best bunkers of the age, the name for the ZAX supercomputer was given in honour Donoughmore; L.A.D.D.I.E.; mostly in honour of Donoughmore's copious use of the word. In 2074, despite the increasingly poor global political situation and domestic strains this caused in the United States, the supercomputer was finally finished, much to the relief of the business and political elite of Swallow Hills. L.A.D.D.I.E.'s first moments in consciousness, or the Artificial Intelligence version of it, were spent calculating possible economic shortfalls and potential worthy investments. For the first two years, the supercomputer beeped and blipped quietly, occasionally tended to by the odd engineer or two, but remained largely dormant in terms of the true capability of an AI; emotions and personality. However, in 2076, a mere year before the Great War, the supercomputer finally began to speak and exercise the intelligence that was afforded by it's advanced electronics. The supercomputer began to exercise boredom as its chief emotion, complaining at length about how awful it was to be constantly bored to anyone who was present in his large, open plan room. Not only this, but it also began to rant about stock market fluctuations and potential investments to even the lowliest Janitor, baffling those without a doctorate in economics with its incessant talk of investment and market fluctuations, with all the babbling and confusing eccentricities thrown in for effect. Not only this, but it sometimes referred to non-existent entities; from strange planets made of metal locked in civil-war, to cars that looked like cars but were secretly giant robots, all of which sounded as though it had been ripped right from a Hubris Comics motion picture script, yet seemed even to confuse the AI, apparently forgetting what it had said within mere minutes of saying it. It seemed that certain elements of the computer's AI were in decay, thus affecting it's personality matrix and causing the apparent neuroticism. As this would involve tearing apart the supercomputer and picking through the components one-by-one, those incharge of it's maintenance ultimately refused to have this minor problem repaired, especially as it did not effect overall output of economic forecasts and seemed even to aid it, minus the babbling about robots, leaving increasingly frustrated lowly staff members to deal with it's constant rants. One day, presumably in mid-2076, an engineer that had grown infuriated by the constant complaining decided to wire up a Pong console to the bored computer in a rather hap-hazard set up, sure that it would at least silence the supercomputer's rantings for a short time. The engineer, it seemed, was wrong; L.A.D.D.I.E. was rather unwittingly allowed to become addicted to the game, using whatever 'free-time' afforded him to play the game and rack up a new highscore. In 2077, on October 23rd of that year, the Great War began, with much of the United States and indeed the world devastated by the subsequent irradiation and ruination. L.A.D.D.I.E., quickly forgotten and left abandoned in the Commercial district, with the main entrance to the building he was housed in destroyed in the chaos and all auxiliary entrances and exits leading to the suddenly now disused sewer systems, themselves largely inaccesible from the surface, was left to his own devices. His neurotic artificial mind became even more unhinged, albeit occupied by Pong and ongoing economic projections, though the latter was naturally limited. Its Protectron workers, occasionally activated through carelessness on the supercomputer's behalf, simply milled about fulfilling their pre-programmed tasks, sometimes marching up to the wastes above only to be destroyed moments later. By 2121, the supercomputer had wracked up what it assumed was going to be it's highest score on Pong. Dissapointed, it set out to perform what it had neglected to do for quite a while; monitor the economics of the town. Feeling rather embarrassed by it's lack of knowledge, it sent out Protectrons to investigate the surface to find out about market fluctuations and itself began to probe active terminals in the region via ancient server snooping . With frequent mention of Bottle caps as the now dominant currency in said terminals, L.A.D.D.I.E. rightly determined it's value, balancing it out between individual brands; for instance, balancing the value of Sunset Sarsparilla caps with Nuka-Cola caps, checking thoroughly the newest available data on this currency. With the arrival of the New California Republic and it's gold reserves and paper notes, L.A.D.D.I.E. began to value the NCR dollar beside the caps, noting with curiousity the evidence pointing to the former being valued less than the latter. By 2242, the supercomputer was now satisfied with the results of metaphorical economic spelunking, settling back down into his games of Pong, beating his original highscore the very next year, to his great delight. With the only visitors he ever had being the odd Radroaches, Scavengers, Feral Ghouls and Bloatflies, the supercomputer settled into a deluded, happy and solitary life; forever keen to beat his highscore on Pong and even keener to measure the scale of post-war economics in the ruined wasteland that he would never see, hidden away from the town that he had been built to serve, oblivious to the collapse of society, the political machinations of Marian Lane and Herman Long and the brutal fighting between Lucan Seville's Acolytes and the Swallow Hills Militia. You could say he's a bit of a workaholic. Personality Despite his Artificial Intelligence, L.A.D.D.I.E. comes off as a rather eccentric and, at times, bumbling personality. Despite his effectiveness at both Pong and economic forecasting, the latter of which forms his primary and most useful core goal, his skills are belied by his rather frequent ramblings and eccentric tones, often breaking into rhapsodies about Pong, finances and economic-political interactions to the odd Scavenger or Feral Ghoul, the latter usually being more interested in biting at the Protectron workers milling around L.A.D.D.I.E. and the former being usually more than surprised at the existence of a large supercomputer in what came across as a rather lonely and squalid slum town. Category:Characters Category:Pre-War Tech Category:Synthetics